Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [103]
For all their brave pre-Enlightenment wisdom in resisting McWorld, however, along the way the Swiss are jeopardizing their prudent multicultural equilibrium. The francophone Swiss are far less attached to German Swiss localist traditions and far more anxious to follow France into a greater Europe than their German, Italian, or Ladin cousins. With only some of the parts willing to fight for the continuing national autonomy of the whole, the whole risks dis-integration—a development that would defeat Switzerland’s confederal democracy as surely as abject surrender to Europe.
A Sovereign Quebec Inside Canada?
MUCH THE SAME ambivalence can be found across the Atlantic among the Quebecois separatists, where federal Canada faces a Quebec province whose separatist leanings have actually been magnified by its recent economic successes. If anything, the resistant part of the whole here is actually as much or even more in tune with McWorld than the whole represented by the Canadian government that Quebec resists.17 Quebec would seem to want it both ways: “a sovereign Quebec inside a united Canada,” as the telling quip goes. Perhaps this is because the Quebecois can be seen (and sometimes see themselves) less as nearly 7 million francophone Canadians (with another million in Canada outside Quebec Province), but as a French diaspora in North America. The struggle for cultural autonomy on the part of diaspora—communities that define themselves by reference to a distant homeland from which they once originated—looks rather different than the struggle of indigenous peoples conquered by or absorbed into a larger entity.
Minority diasporas like the French in Canada, the overseas Indian or Chinese populations, and Jews outside of Israel have forged a friendlier and more economically progressive relationship to McWorld than others, perhaps because they depend on trade for their sustenance and foreign lifelines for their continuing cultural identity. A Quebecois who tries to pretend France does not matter, like a Polish Jew who lives as if there were no Israel, is vulnerable. Security lies in embracing an interdependent McWorld within which the mother cultures can root their legitimacy.18 Quebec thus favors its francophone cultural roots at the same time it celebrates its emerging economic status as a highly productive economic partner—no longer just of Canada’s other provinces, but of the behemoth to the south and multiple overseas partners as well. “Quebec libre” is no longer a francophone entity caught up in poverty and backwardness compelled to retreat from an economically prosperous anglophone Canada into a new isolationism; rather it is a proud French enclave on an English continent deploying a vigorous and growing economy on behalf of its burgeoning linkages to the world beyond Canada. Jihad here embraces economic modernism even as it rejects the multicultural nation-state.
Quebec’s place in Jihad is complicated by the dilemmas it creates for two related peoples: its own native Cree Indian population, and a million or so nonseparatist, non-Quebecois Canadian French who rely on Quebec for their status in Canada as Quebec relies on France. Native American Crees have made their own case for separatism within Quebec, although in the language of a people who see themselves more as guests on the land than its “owners.” They have been greeted with an intensely hypocritical lack of sympathy by Quebecois who somehow cannot grasp the connection between their own suit against Canada and that of the Cree against them. The case of the million or so francophone Canadians living outside of Quebec is perhaps even more embarrassing.